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Each November, Thousands Gather to Hold a Peaceful Protest Against the US Army School of the Americas Outside Th City Research Online City, University of London Institutional Repository Citation: Hamm, M., Ferrell, J. and Greer, C. ORCID: 0000-0002-8623-702X (2010). Provocateur for justice: Notes on the imprisonment of Professor Luis Barrios. Crime, Media, Culture, 6(2), pp. 227-238. doi: 10.1177/1741659010369960 This is the accepted version of the paper. This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link: https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/4260/ Link to published version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1741659010369960 Copyright: City Research Online aims to make research outputs of City, University of London available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the author(s) and/or copyright holders. URLs from City Research Online may be freely distributed and linked to. Reuse: Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge. Provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. City Research Online: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ [email protected] Hamm, M., Ferrell, J. and Greer, C. (2010) ‘Provocateur for Justice: Notes on the Imprisonment of Luis Barrios’, in Crime Media Culture: An International Journal, 6, 2: 227-238 (ISSN: 1741-6590). Provocateur for Justice: Notes on the Imprisonment of Professor Luis Barrios Each November, thousands gather to hold a peaceful protest against the US Army School of the Americas outside the gates of Fort Benning, Georgia, where the School is located. The mission of the School of the Americas (also known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) is to train Central and South American military in counter-insurgency warfare, military intelligence and counter-narcotics operations. The School’s curriculum (taught in Spanish) involves not only techniques of political propagandizing and interrogation, but also torture and assassination. Essentially, the SOA teaches young foreign soldiers how to commit nefarious crimes, then sends them back home to put into practice what has been taught on American soil by American teachers. Since its inception in 1946, more than 60,000 members of Latin American militaries have trained at the School of the Americas (SOA Watch, 2009). SOA graduates have included some of the most notorious human rights abusers in Latin American history. Panama’s Gen. Manuel Noriega, long imprisoned in Florida for international narcotics trafficking, is an SOA graduate, as were Roberto D’Aubuisson, godfather of the Salvadoran death squads during the 1980s, and Bolivia Dictator Gen. Hugo Banzer, who orchestrated a campaign of murder and torture against the Bolivian people from 1971 to 1978 (Gill, 2004). SOA graduates have led military coups. They have massacred entire villages, in the process dismembering old women and infants with chainsaws. They have 1 raped and murdered American church women; tortured labor leaders before throwing them out of helicopters; and murdered priests and nuns in cold blood, including the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, a beloved El Salvador figure and nominee for the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize—shot in the heart by SOA graduates while saying mass in the chapel of a hospital where he worked (Hodge and Cooper, 2004). In 1981, soldiers of the Salvadoran Army, led by a squad of SOA graduates, killed 900 men, women and children in El Mozote, El Salvador, and buried them in shallow graves (Danner, 1994). For the United States Government, these crimes are seen as an unfortunate consequence associated with the development of democracy in Latin America. For others, the School of the Americas is what one critic calls ‘a window through which US foreign policy can be seen clearly’ (Nelson-Pallmeyer, 2001: xvii). For them, the SOA is known as the School of the Assassins, a dark instrument of US foreign policy that undermines democracy and aggravates problems rooted in global inequality—not only in Latin America, but in Iraq, where US polices on torture led to the disgrace of Abu Ghraib. Opposition to the School of the Americas began in November 1990 when a charismatic Cajun priest from Louisiana named Roy Bourgeois, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, and two colleagues commemorated the first anniversary of the assassination of six Jesuit priests and their two housekeepers by SOA-trained Salvadoran soldiers by pouring blood and planting a cross on the grounds of Fort Benning. They were arrested and sentenced to several months in prison (Gill, 2004). Thus were the humble beginnings of the SOA Watch, Bourgeois’ powerful religious-based protest movement to close the School of the Americas. Over the years Bourgeois’ organization has fought (and often 2 won) Congressional battles over funding for the SOA and launched an investigation that forced the Pentagon to admit that the SOA used manuals advocating torture and assassination. By 2006, crowds at the annual November demonstration outside the gates of Fort Benning were drawing some 20,000 human rights activists from around the world, including World War II and Vietnam veterans, union workers, teachers, students, musicians and Hollywood actors. But religious clergy remained the most dedicated to Bourgeois’ vision of shuttering the SOA. And each November, hundreds of these activists risked imprisonment by participating in a solemn ceremony known as ‘crossing the line’—wherein the activist crosses onto the military base in a display of solidarity with the victims of SOA-instigated atrocities. Before making this step onto Fort Benning property, the activist is joined by the crowd in reciting the name of an SOA victim; and then intones the Spanish word, Presente! (Present!). Crossing the line is no small matter. It is a crime punishable by time in federal prison. Between 1990 and 2009, a total of 296 activists have spent a collective 95 years in federal prison for crossing the line (SOA Watch, 2009). A good number of these prisoners have been elderly nuns and priests, including the blind, crippled and infirmed. Yet criminology has paid absolutely no attention to them. Nothing is known about the background of these prisoners of conscience, their motivations for crossing the line and risking careers, family and well-being; nor is anything known of their treatment behind bars. Here, we seek to remedy these failures by publishing original documents associated with the imprisonment of one of these activists. The Case of Luis Barrios 3 Of the thousands who gathered outside Fort Benning on November 22 and 23, 2008, six were found guilty of illegally entering the military base and appeared for sentencing before United States Magistrate Judge G. Mallon Faircloth in Columbus, Georgia, on January 26, 2009. The ‘SOA six,’ as they were called, ranged in age from 21 to 68. Among them was 54-year-old Luis Barrios, an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of New York, chairman of the Latin American studies department at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and a friend of this journal. Ironically, the same week that Professor Barrios began serving his prison sentence he co-authored an article in Crime, Media, Culture entitled, ‘Displacement and stigma’ (Brotherton and Barrios, 2009). We begin with Professor Barrios’ Declaration of Defense, printed here verbatim from court testimony on the day of his sentencing (USA v Luis Barrios et al.). ________ THE COURT: You can have a seat then. I call now case number 4:08-PO-10, United States of America versus Luis Barrios. All right, Mr. Barrios. Reverend Barrios, you have been convicted of violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1382, a criminal trespass upon a government installation and reservation property. I'll hear from you and counsel if you have anything to say prior to sentencing something [sic]. MR. CONWELL [Attorney for Barrios]: Thank you, Your Honor. Just by way of brief introduction, I'd like to explain that Father Barrios is an Episcopalian priest serving in the Episcopal dais of New York, and he's also the chair of the Department of Latin America studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City College in New York, and I would ask Reverend Barrios to try to speak as clearly as possible because I know it's an 4 emotional issue for him, and his Puerto Rican roots may manifest themselves in his speech pattern. So we're going to work on that. THE COURT: I speak Spanish; however, I never mastered Puerto Rican Spanish. It's entirely too fast. DEFENDANT BARRIOS: Yes. THE COURT: So if you would speak English, I'd appreciate it. DEFENDANT BARRIOS: Yes. No problem. Well, first, thank you. You've been very patient. I'm not used to this treatment. I come from New York City. We do things very different, and coming to this court with your patience and your respect, means a lot to me. THE COURT: Thank you. DEFENDANT BARRIOS: So I'm going to request a little more patience with my accent. It's a Caribbean accent from Puerto Rico, but it's a beautiful accent. THE COURT: I think it's excellent. DEFENDANT BARRIOS: Oh, yes. Thank you. So, Honorable Judge Faircloth, on Sunday, November 23rd, 2008, I, along with other human rights activists, crossed the gates of Fort Benning. I did so with a photo of Monsignor Oscar Romero, the former Archbishop of San Salvador. Upon his assassination, this brother, this companion, and this spiritual guide, was converted into our Saint Romero of the Americas. His assassination was planned and executed by graduates from the School of the Americas with the blessings of the USA Government, following a speech in which he pleads to the army to stop massacring the 5 Salvadoran people.
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